“The Greeks hang over Markopoulos’ work of the 1960s, transplanting these stories to New York City via a bevy of famous artists and personalities (featuring Andy Warhol as Poseidon riding an exercycle) just as Cocteau took the Orpheus myth to Saint-Germain-des-Près a decade earlier. But to call these films adaptations seems oddly limiting; if something is brought to the screen, it is as much a philosophy binding characters to place and destiny contained in the original works as it is an exact combination of characters, places, and actions.”

“The film’s apparent anticlimax dares its audience to say “nothing happened” — but to do so is to dismiss every micro-aggression levelled at Tyler throughout the film. It is clear that the weekend’s events have affected him profoundly, especially considering the political context under which they’ve occurred. These small incidents of racism, Tyrel suggests, do not need to culminate in anything resolute. The incidents alone are enough.”

“We were born in the years just following the Whitlam dismissal in ‘75, and it definitely cast a shadow over the time in which we grew up. The way that our mum would invoke Whitlam had this almost mythological edge to it, as though he stood in for all the social justice that should have happened but never did. You got this feeling that Australia had narrowly missed an entirely different destiny, and instead we’d all somehow found ourselves stranded in this other horrific political landscape.”

“The screenshots have been cleaned up and transferred to film, giving off the feel of old classroom slides and making a reasonably recent internet event seem decades old. The effect of links to the parent post and permalink anchored under almost every comment is much the same. We’re continually reminded that this thread, despite the shitposting, is history.”

“The kind of writing that I really love is writing that takes criticism beyond just “is it good or bad?”, because who really cares? What’s important for me is what does it mean for us, this film, what does it say about humanity? How does it sit in history, what does it represent? And I think making films and writing about film should be a dialogue about what film means in our society.”

“The film is endlessly hyperstylised—text bubbles appear on top of phones, small gadgety icons spin out of a computer mouse, the giant faces of live-streamers float through a blue, algorithmic space, giving off, even to the most technologically-challenged viewers, a whiff of the immersive, dystopian techno-richness reminiscent of Black Mirror.”

“To understand any character, you have to understand them through their relationships. You can’t do a character study in isolation. Even to do justice to Manto’s character, it is through his closer relationships that you see his dilemma, you see his contradictions, you see the good and the bad.”

“Well aware of and indeed embracing Sagawa’s capacity to build upon his public image and cultivate his own myth, Caniba shows scant interest in culture, society, context and, as has become convention, the victim. It dedicates itself instead to treating Sagawa’s cannibalistic desire with the seriousness, and the sensory intensity, that he and the filmmakers think it deserves.”

“In Fabric is so effervescently tactile that the repeated image of the ghostly dress wispily feels like it is exhaling from the screen itself. Billowing as it hovers above its sleeping victims, its silky textures caress the audience as much as those in the film unfortunate enough to cross its path. Where Hooper turns the idea of a haunted dress into a pedestrian, colour-by-numbers television movie approach in I’m Dangerous Tonight, Strickland — unsurprisingly — turns it into a high concept art film.”

“There are, ostensibly, two ways to watch the sport of tennis. One, you buy a ticket and go watch the match in person in the stadium, which to me is the best way to do it. The second, the most common, is to watch the match at home on the television, where we watch a selective, edited broadcast of the match. But I was choosing a third way, which was making people go to the cinema to watch a match. Wouldn’t I then have to invent a third way to watch the sport?”